A forum for the print and digital publishing industries

Publishing is packed with growth opportunities — targeted channels, content marketing, lead generation, marketing services, live events and more. So how do you determine the right revenue strategies for your own unique niche brand?

When you visit Scroll for the first time, the message above is softly hammered in. Before you can reach the main content, you have to click or tap, one word at a time, to properly absorb the entire sentence before you are greeted with…

Major U.S. publishers got a big surprise last week when they learned there might be only one printer able to produce their magazines and catalogs. With the blockbuster announcement that the country’s largest publication printer, Quad/Graphics, has a deal to acquire the number two printer, LSC Communications, publishers are going to encounter a less competitive market, and therefore, the likelihood of higher prices for magazine printing and shipping.

People are increasingly willing to pay for the news they consume digitally, at least content produced by reputed publishers. As users sign up for these new services, publishers are seeing benefits in partnering with other companies to offer a wider range of content. The idea is to make their offer more enticing and boost subscriber growth, as well as establish new revenue streams.

News publishers have had an on-again, off-again relationship with personalization. But for USA Today Network, it is very much on, thanks in part to the targeting and taxonomy infrastructure it’s built to target ads.

Single or even double income-stream publishing is increasingly a thing of the past. The search for sustainable revenues has taken many media organizations way beyond advertising or newsstand sales into a seemingly infinite array of money-making schemes.

Do you ever analyze your annual live event through a digital lens? You might be leaving some revenue on the table. There’s podcasts, webcasts, app contests, even online learning opportunities. We consulted digital sales expert and event veteran Ryan Dohrn to share some advice on event management and driving event digital revenue. Read on to learn more!.

Since launching seven years ago, Buro24/7’s publishing proposition has focused on connecting the world’s most desirable brands with the most sought-after demographic – the affluent millennial – or as I like to call them, the ‘re-inventors of luxury’.

Publishers like newsletter subscribers because email is habit-forming, delivered directly to its audience and getting easier to monetize.But the things that make email an attractive channel to publishers also make it a difficult place to re-engage readers. The tricks that might pull straying readers back toward another digital property, such as targeting them with ads on social platforms, are either ineffective, inefficient or unavailable as options for wayward newsletter subscribers.

Following a recent transition of leadership, with the appointments of Stephanie Mehta to editor-in-chief this past February and Amanda Smith to VP, publisher in April 2017, the focus of Fast Company is leaning towards innovation, both in the coverage of the topic and the implementation of inventive practices across its platforms.

How can niche publishers grow their business in these turbulent times? Specialist publishers gathered at the PPA Independent Publisher Conference in London on 2 November, to hear from pioneering brands like The Lawyer, Rock Sound and The Drum about how to reinvent their business and develop new revenue streams.

The publishing industry has been totally transformed in the past decade. In 2008, the rise of online media was simply considered an “emerging threat” to the print media industry by the UK’s TV and radio services regulator Ofcom.

Data, data, it’s all about the data. Or is it? We are here to tell you that chasing data could be a waste of your valuable time. Think about it–does all that data really matter in the niche world of targeted, hyper interested audiences? Sure data analysis is necessary, but without first creating strong content and the right context, it can be pretty meaningless.

When I started this blog a decade ago this month, the Get Rich By Blogging Hype Machine was just getting revved up. Within a few years, pundits declared that blogging is dead, just as they had declared that “Print is dead” a few years earlier. (Both media have shown an annoying tendency to flash a giant middle finger at the pundits, adapting rather than extincting.)

Since launching seven years ago, Buro24/7’s publishing proposition has focused on connecting the world’s most desirable brands with the most sought-after demographic – the affluent millennial – or as I like to call them, the ‘re-inventors of luxury’.

Since Snapchat released its advanced Pixel targeting capabilities to advertisers in June, some direct-to-consumer companies say they are seeing up to a 50 percent lower cost-per-acquisition since applying the Pixel, prompting some to shift spending from Facebook and Instagram.

I often hear folks in the magazine industry lament the fact that there’s not an appetite for innovating and reinventing print publications, despite the still significant role print plays in many publishing companies’ business models.

During the past year, USA Today’s vast network of more than 100 websites has undergone a transformation. By standardizing each of the publication’s templates to match the overall design and impact of the USA Today brand, owner Gannett found a way to not only bridge local and national branding efforts that reach more than 125 million visitors each month, it delivers a more consistent (read: profitable) platform for advertisers.

In an interview with Buzzfeed News, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Apple Tim Cook asked Bloomberg to retract its news report alleging that Chinese spies had compromised company servers by implanting a malicious micro chip on them.

It’s not very often that Google updates its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (for example, it has only done so once this year) and when it does, it provides us with a peek behind the scenes of what the company is emphasizing on—to its team of over 10,000 content quality raters—in terms of search guidelines.

Unilad, one of the biggest publishers on Facebook, has gone into administration, putting hundreds of jobs at risk and casting doubt on whether outlets that rely on the social media platform for distribution can become sustainable businesses.

The Chicago-based company, which also owns the Baltimore Sun; Hartford Courant; Orlando Sentinel; South Florida’s Sun Sentinel; the New York Daily News; the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md.; The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa.; the Daily Press in Newport News, Va.; and The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., announced the decision Thursday. It ends a more than two-year run with the much-derided corporate moniker of Tronc.

Can a publisher survive without Facebook? Danish publisher TV Midtvest decided to find out. With Facebook changing its algorithm to deprioritize news, the publisher initiated a bold experiment: to go off Facebook completely and find out what happens.

Xaxis UK launched a new six-second ad format, Integral Ad Science verification is now available for Snapchat inventory, and Sublime Skinz rebrands to Sublime. Here are the top things that happened in ad tech from September that publishers need to know about:

When Cosmopolitan senior vice president, publisher and chief revenue officer Donna Kalajian Lagani was looking at ways to rethink the title’s October print advertising pages, she turned to the beauty category. Beauty is crucial to the Cosmo audience, she said — it’s made up about 60 percent of all of its advertising volume in 2018, which is up 55 percent from last year.

OK, fellow publishers, Google is on to us. And that probably means readers are on to us as well. As I’ve noted before, Google has generally been kind to magazine media publishers, tweaking its search engine to favor results from respected web sites, especially those with storied print brands.

Association magazines are a common benefit to members and have developed a longstanding, healthy area for publishing. But like much of the print publishing industry, such magazines are beginning to diversify the means for generating revenue.

Back in 2012, I was working as an editor at a major national magazine, and running the publication’s social media accounts fell under my purview. One day I received an email from a Google employee. She worked as a media liaison for Google Plus, a platform that, at this point in time, Google was still hoping would grow to become a viable Facebook competitor..

Are you gazing out the window at the fall colors, (or thinking about your favorite football team) instead of paying attention to all your unanswered emails? What about all the follow-ups? If you want to have stellar ad sales in 2019, think about making some changes NOW.

In pursuit of revenue growth, the move to a subscription model has been inevitable for media businesses. For many publishers, the first inclination is to adopt a paywall strategy that gives readers access to a limited number of articles for free, after which they are charged a fee per article.

Bloomberg Media is trying to turn its Twitter network TicToc into a full-fledged media brand. The network, started in December, was part of a slew of live video push by Twitter that’s included partnerships with Cheddar, the WNBA and BuzzFeed. TicToc was the only 24-7 streaming network, though, so the expectations are higher.

After months of searching, Meredith Corporation has finally found a proper suitor for Time magazine.
On Sunday, September 16, the company announced it has sold the legacy brand it acquired in January this year for $190 million in cash to Marc and Lynne Benioff.

I often speak about how to magically transform your content and audience into digital membership revenue. At the end of the talks, the most frequent question I get is “what is the difference between a paywall (or subscription) and a membership?

“A sense of magic.” “Works like magic.” “Magic” was an oft-repeated part of Apple founder Steve Jobs’ vocabulary. Something he professed to believe was a fundamental aspect of what his company stood for.

In previous posts, I explored the important considerations publishers should make before launching a subscription box and how to get your subscription boxes to your customers. In this third and final post, we’ll look at some ways to grow your subscription box revenue.

The advertising buy side (brands, marketers etc) has always placed a premium on above-the-fold (ATF) ad units. Research from Adomik indicates average ATF bids are $0.43, compared with just $0.08 below the fold (BTF).

There were only a handful of digital officers around in legacy publishing two decades ago. Today, they are climbing to the highest echelons of publishing, and more recently digital officers have ascended to C-suite status with the creation of the title chief digital officer (CDO).

Niche events are a hot revenue stream and everyone’s doing it. But how do you ensure you stand out from the other events in your market? Does your niche event have a WOW Factor? Does it have that special something that makes a lasting impression on your attendees?

It was only a matter of time before publishers’ commerce operations started to get a little more programmatic.
Over the past year or so, a number of publishers, including Purch, MSN, Wirecutter and Allure have been experimenting with making the links in their commerce content biddable, adding a layer of automation to a normally human-powered process.

In the fiercely competitive space that is digital publishing, never has more emphasis been placed on the customer experience. With the increasingly vast number of publishers vying for the attention of readers across various platforms, if one thing is certain, it’s the rapid speed at which the industry has moved over the last decade.